Hacker News Reader

Comment by LoganDark | Hacker News Reader

I really hope that this eventually becomes a thing but I am super sad that it won't any time soon. It really sucks to learn that some lucky people just don't need nearly as much sleep and that I'm just not one of those lucky people and will never be able to achieve that.

View on HN

If everyone gets it, no one is lucky. It becomes the new normal. It could make the world a lot worse in many ways.

Perhaps. Technology, instead of giving us more free time, caused us just to fill that free time with different work.

> Technology, instead of giving us more free time, caused us just to fill that free time with different work

Technology gave us more free time. It also gave us more things to do with that time. You don't need more than a few tens of thousands of dollars of savings to basically retire somewhere remote-ish and live a 19th-century lifestyle. Most of us don't do it because want air travel and internet and modern medicines.

And the free work we do is exactly for the platforms dominating us, we do all the curation of data for their machine learning to train on, getting paid in scraps of dopamine to get addicted and perpetually perform work on data.

Data is the new oil, just better since there's a never-ending cycle of creating more of it.

Absolutely, it would mean 16 hour work days for everyone.

I do not like having to sleep so much. I understand the argument that it could become normalized like e.g. caffeine, but I personally would like to spend closer to the third of my life that is considered "normal" than to the half or over-half of my life that sleep currently seems to be.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com